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Bernard Williams and the Nature of Moral Reflection
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
Extract
In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams offers an unsettling critique of modern moral philosophy, a critique that calls for a radical reorientation that would have us start again leaving behind much or most or what has been done from the time of the flowering of classical philosophy. However, like moral philosophy itself, Williams' critique reaches beyond the theoretical to matters of practical concern. Moral philosophy since the time of Socrates has endeavoured to answer the question, “How should one live?” (1). Williams' critique is unsettling not simply or primarily because it implies that philosophy has much less to contribute to answering this question than Socrates and most philosophers since his time have thought. Rather, it is unsettling because it implies that Socrates' view that an unexamined life is not worth living, together with his assumption, shared by most moral philosophers since his time, that determining how one should live requires that one step back and reflect on the values governing one's life (19ff.), is either seriously misleading (110 and 116) or mistaken (168).
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , Summer 1989 , pp. 355 - 364
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1989
References
1 Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. In what follows all page references to Williams' book will be given in parentheses following the sentence in which the reference occurs.
2 Earlier I referred to Williams' claim that a hypertraditional society was one “that was minimally given to general reflection” (142). Here I refer to Williams' claim that a hypertraditional society is one in which there is no reflection (146). The fact that Williams says both things is one indication that the notion of reflection is a good deal less well defined than it should be given the weight it is required to bear in establishing the conclusions that Williams seeks to establish.
3 The idea that one might live a satisfactory life quite independently of ethical values is explored by Williams in his discussion of Aristotle (Chapter 3: “Foundations of Well Being”). He rejects Aristotle's moral philosophy in large measure because it rules out the possibility of living a good but amoral life, something which Williams claims we moderns know to be genuinely possible. I am not at all sanguine about this assumption. I give some reasons for my skepticism in a critical notice of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy which is forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.